"The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you."--Terry Eagleton

"It is impossible for me to say in my book one word about all that music has meant in my life. How then can I hope to be understood?--Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice."--Bryan Stevenson

Monday, April 09, 2018

Making America White Again

As a country we’ve become captive to a debate about crime and national security, if only in the sense of being forced to constantly refute it. The President continually rails about rape, gang murders, destroyed families. There’s even a special White House office specifically tasked with playing up crimes where immigrants are the suspected perpetrators.

Yes, because one of the powers of the "bully pulpit" is to set the terms of the national discussion. But the issue is not "How have we left Trump define the discussion?", the issue is: "What, exactly, is the discussion?" And the answer is: "Naked, ugly xenophobia."

Ted Osius, the former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, said he resigned from his post last year after the Trump administration asked him to pressure the Vietnamese government to receive more than 8,000 Vietnamese refugees marked in the U.S. for deportation.

Most of the people targeted for deportation — sometimes for minor crimes — were war refugees who had established lives in the U.S. after fleeing the Vietnam War more than 40 years ago, Osius wrote in an essay this month for the American Foreign Service Association.

Why? Ostensibly, because of criminal activity. But the reality is: because they're foreigners, and therefore don't belong here:

The surge in ICE activity appeared to spring in part from the Trump administration's aggressive efforts to deport immigrants with criminal records, even under circumstances under which their home countries haven't cooperated with U.S. removal orders. In the past, immigrants in that situation have been allowed to stay in the U.S., but the Trump administration has been pressing Cambodia and Vietnam, in particular, to take back their nationals.

And it isn't just the Vietnamese Trump is afraid of:

A lot of what's been happening has happened behind closed doors," she said. "I'm encouraged to see somebody going public with speaking out against this policy that the Trump administration is implementing, not only with respect to Vietnam but also with Cambodia, Iraq and Somalia and all of the countries that historically have not repatriated people who are ordered deported."

Time to open those doors and see what the hell is going on behind them. Replacing Congress is a start; after that, impeaching Trump is looking more and more like, not just a good idea, but a necessity.